BAAF's role in the development of the foster care service.

Thoburn, June ; Schofield, Gillian

June Thoburn and Gillian Schofield demonstrate how the development of the foster care service over the last 30 years reveals BAAF's varied points of engagement with policy and practice, which have increasingly helped to shape the foster care agenda.

Foster care 30 years ago

A foster parent's role must always depend on which aspects of the parental role are still being exercised by the natural parents and which are being undertaken by the agency. The foster parents' difficult task is to fill in the gaps so that the child's needs are met without unnecessary overlapping of function. (Rowe, 1977, p 15)

Jane Rowe wrote the article 'Fostering in the seventies' shortly before she 'signed off' as Director of the Association of British Adoption and Fostering Agencies (ABAFA) and moved to an equally crucial role in assisting government by both undertaking and synthesising child welfare research. In the article she characterises foster care at the end of the 1970s as essentially a 'parent supplement' service. For each child, the role of the foster carers was to meet those needs (especially their needs for good-quality parenting) that the birth parents were not able to meet, and for as long as required. She recognised that, for some carers, this meant taking on a full 'care and upbringing role' until the child reached adulthood and, in some cases, on into adult life ('foster parents' rather than 'foster carers' was the most frequently used term). However, in very few cases would this mean that birth parents had no role to play as their children grew up.

Rowe established that the majority of children living with foster families at any point in time would be in 'longer-term' or 'care and upbringing' placements, but that the majority of children who at any time in their lives experienced foster care would be with foster carers fulfilling a short-term role for a specific, short-term purpose. The concept of foster care careers rather than foster care as an undifferentiated service was already firmly established by the start of the 1980s when ABAFA became BAAF and Adoption & Fostering was relaunched as the major UK vehicle for the publication of practice and research articles.

Throughout the next 30 years, BAAF (through workshops, training events and especially its book publishing arm and Adoption & Fostering) has encouraged research and reported on developments in foster care. This 'intelligence' has been used both to encourage developments in practice and to work with local authorities, the 'third sector' and government to achieve positive change in the service for children, birth families and carers. An aspect of this work that we shall comment on is the changing emphasis BAAF has placed on its dual role of championing both adoption and foster care. Although for BAAF (in its 'lobbying' role) there have been changes of emphasis, this has been less marked with respect to the organisation's publishing arm, which throughout the period has been a vehicle for publications on all aspects of child placement policy and practice. We would like to pay tribute, here, to the role of Sarah Curtis, editor of Adoption & Fostering from 1976 to 1987, in keeping her ear to the ground and commissioning contributions from the broad spectrum of child welfare research, as well as sifting through submitted articles, a tradition built on by the editors that followed her.

The 1980s

During the period leading up to the Children Act 1989, BAAF's London fostering project (BAAF, 1982) resulted in definitions of six types of short-term and two types of long-term foster family placement (four if custodianship and long-term kinship care are included).

There was a large element of consensus about the short-term aims of 'rehabilitation', 'preparation for permanence' through adoption, 'bridge to independence' for older children or treatment foster care. Nancy Hazel had already brought back from Sweden and introduced initially to Kent Social Services Department a 'professional fostering' scheme, providing defined-length placements mainly for teenagers (described in her seminal 1981 text, A Bridge to Independence).

In contrast, the respective roles of adoption and 'care and upbringing' foster care placements for children who could not return to their families was more contested territory. In the wake of the Rowe and Lambert (Children who Wait, 1973) report of ABAFA-initiated research on children who remained for long periods in unplanned and often unstable care, and of reports from the US of successful adoption placements of older and otherwise 'hard-to-place' children, long-term foster care had already, in 1980, been overshadowed by the drive to 'special needs' adoption. In the light of recent developments, it is also interesting to note that numbers placed in foster care with relatives were also in decline. By and large, BAAF during this period, especially in its lobbying activities, became identified with championing adoption and the importance of time limits during which this should be achieved (see especially the influential article by Hussell and Monaghan, 1982). The championing of foster care was largely left to the National Foster Care Association (NFCA), a body which at that time not only emphasised the professionalisation of foster care but also, in that context, task-centred rather than 'family for life' fostering.

As a result, long-term foster care was, politically speaking, 'in the doldrums' for much of this decade. It was left to the Family Rights Group (FRG) and to the Dartington research team led by Spencer Millham and Roger Bullock (1986) to articulate the importance of links with birth families for children in long- as well as short-term care. The (in retrospect unhelpful) polarisation around the weight to be placed on links with birth parents was played out in BAAF's Terminating Parental Contact (Adcock and White, 1980) and the FRG's response, Fostering Parental Contact (Family Rights Group, 1982).

This situation arose despite the fact that foster care research and practice had made some important steps forward, with Adoption & Fostering very often 'scooping' the early articles and dissemination events. Some of the voluntary sector specialist permanent placement agencies (notably Barnardo's' Barkingside project led by Joan Fratter) placed children for both permanent foster care and for adoption, with differing degrees of birth family contact in sufficient numbers for these to be evaluated by Thoburn and Rowe (1988). They concluded from this longitudinal study of over 1,100 children, mostly placed when aged three or older, that when the characteristics and any difficulties of the children were held constant, there was no statistically significant difference in the likelihood of placement disruption between those placed with the intention of permanent foster care and those placed with the intention of adoption. They also concluded that continuing parental contact was either a neutral or a protective factor and Thoburn's (1985, p 30) Adoption & Fostering article identified eight 'routes to permanence'.

As can be seen from the above, the publications wing of BAAF (sometimes in an important partnership with Batsford Publishers) continued to publish research on long-term foster care, including that by Jane Rowe and colleagues (1984). This identified both strengths and weaknesses in practice and pointed to some necessary changes, some of which found their way into the Children Act 1989 and even foreshadowed important changes made by the Children and Young Persons Act 2008. The video It's Like a Bereavement (Hundleby, 1984) was a powerful product of this research, documenting the poor quality of much of the work with birth parents of children in foster care during this period. Informed by the early work on this project, Jane Rowe was commissioned by BAAF to synthesise research, policy and practice in Fostering in the Eighties (1983). In both of these publications she pointed to the important role of kinship foster carers, reporting, for the first time, generally more positive outcomes than for non-kinship carers. Also, along with the Select Committee (House of Commons Social Services Committee, 1984), Bill Jordan (1981) and Olive Stevenson (1980), she articulated a note of caution about the tendency to see permanence as synonymous with adoption, to the exclusion of improved practice in foster care and reunification:

The emphasis on permanence sharpens perceptions about what can and should be done to offer security within the framework offostering as well as through adoption. (Rowe, 1983, p 20)

There would appear to be some danger that this established resource (long-term fostering) will be completely repudiated before adequate efforts have been made to identify the group of children for whom it still may be the placement of choice and without proper consideration ofways in which fostering could be improved. (Rowe, 1983, p 30)

By the end of the 1980s, most local authorities had taken their lead from the pioneering voluntary agencies and had set up their own adoption agencies, separate from their fostering teams, and long-term fostering tended to fall between the two. Much of BAAF's effort on training and guidance materials went into providing training and conferences for these adoption teams. The BAAF forms E and F, developed largely as tools for the assessment of adopters and the permanence needs of children, began to be 'stretched' for the assessment of foster carers. At the end of the decade, the large-scale Rowe et al (1989) study of almost 10,000 placements built on the BAAF fostering project and quantified the proportions of children placed in different sorts of foster care and the differential 'success rates' for these different aims. Thirteen per cent of nearly 4,000 recent placements were for 'care and upbringing' and over two-thirds of these were rated as 'successful'. The majority were placed with one of six short-term/task-focused aims.

The 1989 legislation sought to achieve a balance between family support and children's need for protection and a sense of permanence if long-term care became necessary. Also during the decade, the reduction in residential group care placements had led to children in foster care having more complex problems, accentuated by the increase in issues of addiction and domestic conflict among the parents of children needing placement. Another key development during this period, largely springing from adoption-focused work but importantly influencing child welfare as a whole and foster care in particular, was BAAF's role in powerfully articulating the needs of children with disabilities and children of minority ethnic heritage (continued throughout these 30 years).

The 1990s

The Children Act 1989 emphasised placement in care or accommodation as part of a family support service (see Department of Health, 1989; Packman and Hall, 1998; Aldgate and Bradley, 1999 on the benefits to parents and children of well-managed short-term care services). However, for the first half of the 1990s, foster care as a whole received little government attention, although NFCA published training materials, recommendations on allowances and in 1999, the (Department of Health recommended) National Foster Care Standards. This was especially the case for long-term fostering, which was still not considered in most local authorities and in government guidance as a 'permanence option'. If anything, attitudes to long-term fostering were in a worse state towards the end of the 1990s than in the 1980s, with the dominant discourse being about children 'lingering' and 'languishing' in foster care.

Around the middle of the decade, research reports and the increasing strength of the voices of young care leavers and foster carers themselves gradually gave voice to the neglect suffered while in care of those for whom neither return home nor adoption were appropriate. In particular, they highlighted the multiple placement changes and the fact that too many young people were leaving care around the age of 16, having become detached from birth families but not made links with new families. Towards the end of the decade the Quality Protects initiative (Department of Health, 1998) finally sought to introduce some urgency and resources into all aspects of placement policy and practice.

The general pattern of BAAF's lobbying and development work in the 1980s continued through most of the next decade, if anything with the emphasis on adoption enhanced by a growing pessimism about the potential of the care system to be of benefit, and especially by the strong support for increasing adoption from care provided by Tony Blair when New Labour came into government in 1997 (see Performance and Innovation Unit, 2000). However, BAAF publications and Adoption & Fostering continued to report on the many research and often small-scale practice developments, especially in foster care, with renewed interest in a range of 'professional' foster care projects, this time imported from the USA rather than Europe (Chamberlain and Reid, 1998; Walker et al, 2002). BAAF's publications, training and development activities played important roles in the development of respite fostering for children with disabilities, and it was among the few bodies that focused on the needs of privately fostered children and their carers.

However, the independent sector built on the early 'professional fostering' work of Nancy Hazel and stepped in to meet the growing demand for foster placements that local authorities were unable to meet from their own resources (charted by Sellick, 1999 and more recently--forthcoming). BAAF responded to this development by hosting a special interest group.

The 2000s

By 2000, the renewed focus on all types of placement brought in by Quality Protects was beginning to take effect, with the Choice Protects initiative (Department of Health, 2002) to promote fostering also contributing to the debates and actions leading to Care Matters (Department for Education and Skills, 2006) and the Children and Young Persons Act 2008. Towards the end of the decade, a more balanced view about the positives as well as the negatives of out-of-home placement began to be reported (see Bullock et al, 2006). Much of the research was conducted by members of BAAF's Research Group Advisory Committee or showcased at BAAF-hosted dissemination events. Of particular importance among these were studies by Lowe, Murch et al (2002) and by Selwyn et al (2006), as they demonstrated that many of the children for whom a 'family for life' placement was needed found this, if they were going to do so, through a permanent foster family placement. The BAAF-published research by Schofield and Beek (Schofield et al, 2000; Schofield, 2003) also showed that when a 'sense of permanence' was a guiding principle, permanent foster care could take its place alongside adoption as a placement of choice. At the same time, research by Sinclair and colleagues (2007) and Farmer et al (2004) with respect to teenagers demonstrated that instability in foster care continued and was sometimes created by the reluctance to recognise that children who had put down roots should not be moved for pragmatic reasons, and that an inflexible approach to leaving care planning might be preventing some young people from remaining part of their foster families well into adult life.

BAAF's policy focus on foster care in the context of permanence broadened with its landmark piece of work undertaken in partnership with the Fostering Network on the financing of foster care (Tapsfield and Collier, 2005).

From 1998, with the arrival of Felicity Collier, John Simmonds and later David Holmes, the further strengthening of BAAF's research support and publications activities led to a broadening of the focus of its lobbying work. The emphasis on placement stability for all who needed long- or short-term care, or were 'on the edges of care' was central to the approach taken to lobbying and development work. BAAF gave cogent evidence to the Select Committee Inquiry on looked after children (House of Commons, 2009) and Care Matters (Department for Education and Skills, 2006). In broadening its focus, BAAF became recognised as a major 'home' for all those seeking to improve services for children needing care or on the edges of care.

The appointment of a specific fostering development consultant contributed to a range of fostering initiatives. Work with the Maudsley team led not only to the Fostering Changes programme (Pallet et al, 2005) but also to an innovative practice development project focused on children's learning and literacy (Pallett et al, 2010). A further partnership with the Centre for Research on the Child and Family at the University of East Anglia led to a Big Lottery-funded BAAF project on planning for permanence in foster care that also resulted in new practice guidance (Schofield and Beek, 2008).

Conclusion

The recent range of BAAF fostering projects has led to research books and articles, practice guides, training manuals, national conferences and the active use of research-based materials by BAAF consultants and trainers with practitioners in all four UK countries. It has required partnerships across the policy, practice and academic research communities in order to make best use of BAAF's role as a catalyst for action on the fostering agenda. This diversity of activity and knowledge transfer in foster care, alongside consistently high levels of consultation and lobbying, demonstrate how active BAAF has become in influencing policy, research and practice in foster care.

Key words: foster care, policy and practice, history, BAAF

References

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[c] June Thoburn and Gillian Schofield 2010

June Thoburn is Emeritus Professor of Social Work, University of East Anglia

Gillian Schofield is Professor of Child and Family Social Work, University of East Anglia